I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal” — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City.

Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,”that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.”

But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.

Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that “déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations,” you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.

Brings Freud’s essay on the uncanny to mind (deja vu!)—that moment when the familiar becomes unfamiliar or the unfamiliar, eerily familiar. That disorienting moment makes you question yourself, whether you’re seeing things right, or whether you’re going out of your mind. It can be a moment of insight; it can be a moment of terror. In a universe of randomness it makes us believe in ghosts … and gods.

This is all so spooky in a wonderful way. I’m a fan. Lately, I’ve been going through chains of events, where something, like hearing a piece of music, or observing some pattern of shadow and light, kicks off a big emotional Deja Vu kind of feeling. Then there will be some kind of coincidence that feels like a meaningful synchronicity.

I just read the article about why there may be ETs and they stay away from us and it’s so much like things that have popped into my imagination. Then, I saw this and it’s also like that.

I had gotten to the point where I actually got images and info in my mind of a solar system with 2 suns and 12 planets. It got to the point where I was thinking, “What?!? I had a past life on another planet?!?” What do I do with such craziness? The answer: write fiction!

I’m working on 2 novels now. One is a memoir, where everything in it actually occurred, but it can be interpreted as fantasy and the other is sci fi, where earthlings discover this solar system, with beings who have been observing them.

Sam Harris once said, in his book Freewill, “Our minds appear to be making decisions before we’re actually aware of them.” If that is the case, Kaku had access to it before the usual routine for some reason, perhaps he was high :)

When we go to sleep..our soul gets free to the the one, and during that period of time our soul can travel not only in earth in the entire infinity where past present future are mixed to one time, our soul can travel and experiance at any time and any place and that advanture remain in our unconcious…that memory can appear when we return to aplace we have been before…even if it was only with our soul…in the kabalah it is well known that our souls are traveling in the infinity space, thats why we thank the one for opening our eyes after sleeping everyday…we do not take this for granted…

I have often wondered the same thing about ghosts. If 2 strands of time cross, the arc containing the past bleeds through instead of a dead relative, you are seeing an actual person from another dimension.

Dejavu has been theorized to be minute localized seizures. Whereas you have the experience, have the seizure, the memory is “rewound” and it feels like a new memory. It would be nearly impossible to have two exact experiences in two different multiverses.

Funny, I’ve had the same theory for years. Long before I ever heard of Michio Kaku or Fringe for that matter. I formulated my theory based on some life experiences with Deja Vu.
I may be one of the few people that think Kaku hasn’t gone off the reservation, but I have my own very personal reasons for thinking that.

Well, I believe it is physics, and I would love to share my hypothesis with him. I suspect he would be interested. Too bad I don’t know how to reach him. He’d likely enjoy my thoughts on this, and perhaps politely tell me I’m being silly.

No. It’s a filing error. Immediate sensory stimulation bypasses short term memory buffer in the brain. What you sense matches long term memories because it’s simultaneously storing and retrieving from there.

Hi mon Professeur Micho
I have experienced more dimensions to time that you have not mentioned, and these effects are experienced by a group in an area of space in a moment in time….. (1) Time viscosity, where you feel everything drags and things take longer, while everyone else see you move normally at a fast pace , you find out you have done significantly less than any other instant when time was less viscous.
(2) a ride for the same distance , the same place takes longer , about a few minutes longer , and the effect is felt by all those with you …. I haven’t clocked it because its spontaneous and unpredictable.
(3) You are told by a form of apprehension , whether a vision of a whisper of things that will happen in a short while or years thereafter.
This no joke or making fun of anyone , I am damn right serious , and I used it to my advantage, time like any other dimension has the same Physical properties , or would it be Mathematical properties !!! Cheers and all the best.
Sattar

“Lately, I’ve been going through chains of events, where something, like hearing a piece of music, or observing some pattern of shadow and light, kicks off a big emotional Deja Vu kind of feeling. ”

Wow! I’ve been getting that a lot over the last few years! Little things, maybe just the colour of the sky at a certain time of day gives me a strong sense of Deja Vu. It’s as though I’m experiencing the faint echo of something I’ve seen before, familiar and very comforting but annoying because it only lasts a few seconds. I took to thinking of it as a sign that maybe I’m on the right path. I don’t know, perhaps it’s just a trick of the mind but it feels much more that that sometimes.

The deja vus I get in the past were very detailed down to street signs and road names speed signs with the speed limit to people whom were with me
Places I had never been before…..
I knew what the people around me would do next and say to each other….
I still haven’t found a logical explanation…but would love theories
I have written down dreams or thoughts and told them to people in the past
And they were witness to things happening that I had described years or months later.

I knew a doctor once who thought the experience might be caused by small seizures.

I know that precognition is possible (I and many others I know have experienced it repeatedly) and I believe (but don’t understand) that time is an illusion.

The most mind-blowing possible explanation I ever read is found in A Course In Miracles: “Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written. When experience will come to end your doubting has been set. For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again, reviewing mentally what has gone by.”

This was an idea I came up with about a year and a half ago, wonderful to see these kinds of ideas making it into serious discussion. I wonder if my messages on facebook proliferated the discussion and brought it to his ears. Nice fantasy I suppose ^_^

One of the central “Moody Traits” of the Near-Death Experience is known as the “panoramic life review.” This is the classic “I saw my life flash before my eyes.” Imagine a scenario whereby in the last milliseconds of our lives we experience our whole life in a literal minute-by-minute reconstruction from birth to death. This takes place in subjective time and as such a whole life can be experienced. In that second life we suffer from a form of amnesias in that we do not know we are living this life again. Indeed the ancient Greeks termed this the “drinking of the waters of the Lethe.” However sometimes the recollections of the previous life leak through and are perceived as deja vu sensations (actually deja vecu, but let’s not get too technical. The “memories” that create this “life simulation” are equivalent to the programmed scenarios in a first person RPG game such as “Tomb Raider.” As such the outcomes of all decisions are accommodated within the program. Therefore the second life need not be a literal re-creation of the first. Subtle changes can be made …. in the way “Conners” does in the movie “Groundhog Day.” At the end of that second life there will be another NDE scenario and another life-review is entered. Indeed many lives with subtle or major changes can be experienced. As such, if you experience deja vecu it is likely you are living in a simulation of your life …. this is not as far fetched as it seems. The “simulation argument” using known factors of quantum mechanics has long been suggested, together with the idea that it is not matter that is the basic constituent of the universe but digital information which, by its very nature, is non-physical (c.f. the work of Professor Nick Bostrom and Professor Vlatko Vedral). I know this may also sound like “new age” waffle but if you are in any way interested in this suggestion check out my books ….

Interesting theory, but I’d rather go with the nature of time. Quantum physics perceive time rather as a solid, one-piece ‘ribbon’, complete with it’s beginning and it’s hypothetical end. From quantum physics’ perspective it’s not yet entirely explained why we can only perceive the current moment and just remember past moments, and we can’t see time as a whole. In short – why don’t we constantly see the whole ‘past’ and every possible ‘future’. Maybe deja vu is this split second moment in which your subconscious familiarity with the specific moment becomes somewhat more apparent to your conscious mind, even though, that from the rational point of view it should have been actually happening right now for the first time so it shouldn’t feel familiar.

Or, you know, it may just be a false experience, a trick played on us by our own imperfection, just like optical illusions.

Deja Vu (and Jamais Vu, it’s opposite, where the familiar is experienced as the unfamiliar) is activity in the memory center of the brain, where seizure activity occurs. Find yourself a good epileptologist, please.

I just feel that if re-incarnation is real, maybe is possible to re-incarnate into the same life again (a kind of cycle), since when we die, we go to a fifth dimension (where no time exist, and all times co-exist), is just possible to re-live our lifes many times, perhaps because we need to learn something and deja-vus hint on if we’re doing the right thing or not.

The notion of parallel universes enchant me. sometimes, I tell my other selves who might be having a better time of it than me in this universe, to get on it and lend me a hand somehow. find a way to break through and help guide me during a dark time. and I tell you, it is wonderfully peaceful to think some entity out there is somehow looking out for me. It must be the way people feel about god. I like it. I like the fact that it is me and my alternate entities somehow trying to enhance the life of me right here right now. I know about the psychology of it all, but it is not just “getting in touch with myself” to gain personal insight. It is more like getting in touch with my other universe selves to enhance all of ourselves. I like it…I am my own god…to myself and for myself.

I agree with you Shara, I experienced deja vu only with my dealings with other people and eventually to people who never expect; never in situations without interaction with people … I ask, you’ve read the book “reconnection” Dr. Eric Pearl?

I’ve had a few episodes of déjà vu that ‘blew my mind’. One of them is when walking home from high school with a friend, and all of the sudden, as we were right in the middle of crossing a street, I had a strange feeling come over me. We had never taken that particular route on our walk from school before. But it ‘felt’ like we had, and also at that very moment, I found myself thinking each word my friend was going to say prior to him saying it. And it was word for word lasting several sentences worth. Then the feeling went away, and I no longer was able to know what he was going to say anymore. That entire event freaked me out.

Also, not long after that déjà vu event, it happened once again and at the same place and time, and with the same words. And sometime after that déjà vu event, it happened yet again! So, this was double déjà vu.

And I had another double déjà vu event at another place. Same place, same people, same words, and same actions such as so and so will now come into view as he turns the corner, and will say the same words that I knew he was going to say to another person.

And in the second déjà vu events in both accounts, I knew what was happening by that point, and so was prepared to focus in on it, and ‘ride’ with it and to try to figure out how this was happening. But I’ve never been able to explain it.

What about just a crossed wire circuit in the brain that triggers memory recall apperception when it shouldn’t> The circuit says “I remember that from before” whereas it’s actually getting information from the neural processing of the first/only phenomenal experience. Presumably the parallel universe might be time synchronised due to branching on the Everett model, so there would be no memory established anyway.

As an amateur natural scientist and psychologist I would like an explanation of the difference between creative imagination (and it’s product, science fiction) and the “theory” of parallel universes. Once you buy into the idealism that there is no objective reality independent all varieties of observation and philosophy… that everything depends on how you look at it and think about it, then you can claim whatever suits your fancy as a “possible reality.” That is what Kaku does, and it passes for science because of his physics credentials. Speculation is the creative wing of science but evidence is required to distinguish it from pure imaginative fiction.

same as “Max load” see what i need to see, not what i want to see. Talk to people who don’t get it, they don’t understand, think you are insane. I don’t know why i’m like this or why others are not. When i was little i thought everyone was the same, when i was enlightened to the fact they are not, i didn’t talk about it, with anyone, till i was over 40. Always the ‎vaguest part is time, when will this happen. Also you are a spectator, if you change something there is always an unexpected and undesirable outcome. So a pretty shit gift.

Yes, decoherent, I get that but their are aspects of quantum coherence in the macro world. Lasers, phase conjugate mirrors and invisibility cloaks, superconductivity and superfluidity. If we are talking about mind that could possibly exist in superpositional states of deep coherence – then yes. Trouble is, I have never found Deja’s vu to be such a state of deep awareness and beyond my intent. But maybe . . . What is mind? Is t an emergent property of the brain or something larger?

I have been experiencing persistent Deja vu for the past 8 years. I’ve seen neurologist, gotten eeg’s and mri’s done and still there isn’t any explanation for why I am experiencing this every day from the moment I wake to the moment I sleep. Even dreams and thoughts seem like Deja vu many times…

Sorry to disappoint folks – but deja vu is exactly the misfiring of neurons (min-seizures) in the memory part of the brain. I had them as a teenager, and they returned for four months before a full-blown TLE pair of seizures. Surely it has to do with recognising new experiences as old or old experiences as unfamiliar (jamais vu). Nothing complicated conceptual-wise!

He may have strolled into a Motel 6 for his deja mojo. We all know they are exactly alike across the USofA. Wonder how he’ll feel next time he heads into a McDonalds. Just can’t wait for his next dispatch on that experience.

Hi,
Actually, déjà-vu is actually what one has already experienced as real in one’s dreams and the déjà-vu refers back to that partial memory from one’s dream. So sorry, I have to disagree with Dr Kaku to the extent that dreams do not have any discernible connection to parallel universes, or do they??

The fact of deja vu:
In this world everything becomes fix before it happens. Something becomes fix before a second, something before 1 minute, something before some years and so on. Some people see and feel before some months, some before some years. Human mind is capable to see the future. And some future we can see just a second before it happens in reality. This is the deja vu. The concept of parallel universe is 100% wrong. I am not a scientist but I know many universal secret which Science has not figure out.

i had a moment last weekend was lookin at the sunset have never been to this particular place in my life but as the sun set i had a moment of wow i have seen this and have had same conversation on where the sun would set on the horizon i live in the yukon we have magnificent scenery and that sunset was nothing short of amazing for obvious reason

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.